The Woman in the Window
Subtitle: Commerce, Consensual Fantasy, and the Quest for Masculine Virtue in the Russian Novel
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: Oct 20, 2014
Language: eng
Format: hardcover
Number of pages: 208
ISBN-13: 9780814212677
Description: In The Woman in the Window: Commerce, Consensual Fantasy, and the Quest for Masculine Virtue in the Russian Novel, Russell Scott Valentino offers pioneering new insights into the historical construction of virtue and its relation to the rapidly shifting economic context in modern Russia. This study illustrates how the traditional virtue ethic, grounded in property-based conceptions of masculine heroism, was eventually displaced by a new commercial ethic that rested upon consensual fantasy. The new economic world destabilized traditional Russian notions of virtue and posed a central question that Russian authors have struggled to answer since the early nineteenth century: How could a self-interested commercial man be incorporated into the Russian context as a socially valuable masculine character. -- from back cover.
Notes: Source title: The Woman in the Window: Commerce, Consensual Fantasy, and the Quest for Masculine Virtue in the Russian Novel